Darcy’s approach to music theory has inspired hundreds of students to go beyond the notes to see music from a narrative perspective. Germany, examining all of the composer’s sketches for Das Rheingold, the prelude to the Ring cycle. (Darcy’s Oberlin course on this 15hour saga became legendary.) His work on Das Rheingold included transcribing the unkempt first compositional draft. “It was my job to try to interpret this. My work as a composer helped me.” The research led to a book, Wagner’s Das Rheingold—part of Oxford University Press’ Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation—which won Darcy the Society for Music Theory’s Wallace Berry Award. And then he did it again: a second Berry Award for Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata, which he wrote with musicologist James OBERLIN CONSERVATORY MAGAZINE 2014
Hepokoski, a former Oberlin faculty member and current chair of the music department at Yale University. Darcy is the only person to win the award twice. The 661-page book on sonata theory, which has come to be known as the Red Book for the color of its cover, was a 12-year project that gave the collaborators the space to focus, in almost surgical detail, on principles Darcy has taught in his Oberlin classes. Joseph Hauer, a fourth-year pianoperformance major, says Darcy’s course on the string quartet—“probably the best class I took here”—is rooted in sonata theory, which distills the Classical form of the sonata to its component parts as it illuminates other musical ramifications.
“Instead of just chords, you’re looking at even larger structures,” says Hauer. “Instead of how a phrase works, you see how a whole movement works and a whole piece works. I got an understanding about large structures and sonata theory, and how a form like that can be a narrative.” Darcy’s approach to music theory has inspired hundreds of students to go beyond the notes to see music from a narrative perspective. These lessons have guided young musicians in shaping cohesive and perceptive interpretations of works they’re studying. “As a performer, it’s easy to prioritize very local things and focus less on the global aspects,” says Luke Adamson, who’s in his fourth year of a double degree in cello and 47